Feb 5, 2015

HFM 11.1.2.4 on a Linux "Exa-VM" (Virtual Exalogic image)

With the new 11.1.2.4 version of HFM that Oracle released this week, we now have support for HFM on Linux servers. Now the support for Linux is available only on an Exalytics server so if you were planning on test driving HFM on Linux (say in a VM) you're out of luck, right? eeerrrr! wrong. You actually have a couple of options:

Option 1: you can actually take a commodity Linux installation (Oracle or RedHat) and follow my colleague's blog for basically "making it work" with OOB Linux.

An OOB Linux installation may not have all the correct packages installed, so you will be presented with a screen like the one below explaining the missing packages. Once you install these you're ready to install EPM 11.1.2.4on Linux.

Option 2: With this option, you will actually be installing EPM 11.1.2.4 in a virtual machine in VirtualBox using Oracle's Exalogic image. I was made aware of the ability to do this by other Infratects colleague (thanks Giacomo). The blog to simulate Exalogic in a virtualbox VM is here Now, you don't have to actually follow the entire blog post to have a full Exalogic node(s) running, all you really need is to download and install the VM with the Oracle Exalogic image (step 4) and then install EPM 11.1.2.4 on that. This image is a specially "cooked" version of Oracle Linux version 5.9 (I used EL_x4-2_baseimage_linux_2.0.6.1.0).

The first thing I noticed, is that Hyperion doesn't complain about any missing RPM's etc.

You can choose to install whichever products you need:

It all installs very smoothly with no issues (remember the Common Components issue on Linux on 11.1.2.3?)

Once you're done installing EPM, go ahead and start it up and add an HFM application. It will work right away, now you have a Linux VM running HFM.

Now you can use the VM for demos, testing, development or just for bragging rights! :)